I got bad news the other day. I knew it was coming, but I kept pretending that perhaps it just wouldn’t happen.
You know, like you do with income taxes, falling asleep at 9 p.m., and getting excited when you buy a new dishwasher.
But my neighbor told me those words I’ve dreaded hearing for the last 17 years, “I saw a cicada in my yard.”
I live in the great state of Maryland—home to Orioles baseball, Ravens football, and summers full of humidity and steamed crabs.
Edgar Allan Poe died here. And just as his many works have given me shivers down my spine, so are the next living things about to die here en masse: the 17-year cicadas.
These bugs, with their red, beady eyes and slow, lumbering way of flight, come out after living in the ground for 17 years and sucking from the roots of trees.
They emerge from said ground, and, if this weren’t enough, they molt–rubbing their creepy bodies against anything they can to get rid of their exoskeletons, leaving piles and piles of what look like swarms of dead locusts.
But they’re not locusts, and they’re also not dead.
Oh, and the discarded shells they leave behind “crunch” when you walk on them. Sorry, but I don’t get the same happy feeling if I accidentally step on one of those as I do when I crunch through piles of fall leaves. I don’t want to jump in a pile of them either—eek!
With their outer shells gone, they then begin singing to attract mates.
But it’s not really singing—it’s that scary sound that locusts (again, but cicadas aren’t locusts) make on hot summer night. Some say it sounds like the rainforest. I counter that it also sounds like the latest soundtrack to a Stephen King film.
I remember the last couple times that the cicadas came out—which is odd, considering that I’m only 29.
Last time was in 2004. While my husband and I lived in the ‘burbs in a townhome, we didn’t have a lot of yard, so we didn’t see a lot of them. But I remember driving through neighborhoods filled with trees and seeing their shells everywhere—piles and piles—in the gutters, in yards, in the street. It was like a horror movie. I was totally grossed out.
Before that, it was in 1987. I was in college and living with my parents in Baltimore City. I remember seeing them twice that year: once when I went to a baseball game at Memorial Stadium, where they flew around like they were drunk and people batted at them with giant foam fingers to keep them away, and on television when the famous magic duo Penn & Teller were in town. They actually cooked and ate some.
Shudder…
Now, my husband and I live in the sticks. We have trees—lots and lots of trees.
Normally, I love this. But now, I’m waiting to wake up one morning to a sequel to Hitchcock’s The Birds, this time called The Cicadas: you think they can’t hurt you, but they sure do seem like they will.
“But they don’t sting. They won’t hurt you,” people say to me. Yeah, okay, but they swarm.
Yes, swarm.
Take a quick break and go look at my photo. We’ll wait…
Do you see all that hair? That is prime real estate for these bugs of my nightmares.
You know what kinds of things have gotten stuck in my hair over the years? Well, besides brushes, and I stopped trying combs a long time ago.
Bees, yellow jackets, spiders, and beetles—and not the fun kind who sang about wanting to hold my hand. This causes me to run around shaking my head in near-convulsive style or yelling at the person nearest to me to “Get it out!”
You really learn who truly loves you in these moments.
So getting a swarm, or even a couple, of cicadas stuck in my hair…well, it would probably result with the end of this column because I would surely drop dead.
Really hoping to see you here next week.
Michele Wojciechowski, who cringes every time she thinks about cicadas getting stuck in her curly hair, writes Wojo’s World® from Baltimore. She’s also the author of the award-winning humor book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box. You can connect with Wojo on Facebook or on Twitter.
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